For portable data carriers and mobile electronic devices there are diverse security mechanisms known which are intended to ensure the integrity of the device and of the data saved thereon, or the unique identification of the data carrier or of its owner.
The technical basis for such mechanisms that protect integrity or make identification possible is often a specially secured storage area for saving e.g. identification data tamper-resistantly therein. There exist for example special insulating mechanisms by which hardware areas and/or accesses to software components of a terminal for security-critical data and processes can be set up and effectively sealed off from accordingly unsecured areas, e.g. by software solutions, such as secure virtual processors, or hardware solutions, such as dedicated security kernels. Within such a secured area, in particular security-critical processes can be executed, e.g. in by a secure runtime environment by means of a suitable interpreter.
For reasons of security and practicality, data relating to an individualization or identification of portable data carriers are usually saved during the production process, or at least before the issue of the relevant data carrier to a user, in the data carrier, e.g. in a secured area of a chip card, smart card or the like. A corresponding individualization of arbitrary mobile terminals within the framework of a production process involves considerable costs, however, on account of the infrastructure necessary therefor and a lower throughput resulting therefrom.
In principle, cryptographic methods are available for individualization of mobile terminals, for example based on a symmetric key pair present on the terminal to be individualized, the public key of said key pair being provided with an electronic certificate by a trustworthy certification authority. Through a certification, communication partners of the relevant device who are employing its public key for encryption or for checking a signature of the device can make sure that the public key actually comes from the relevant device and has not been planted for fraudulent purposes.
In this connection, WO 2008/049959 A2 proposes a certification method according to the PKCS specification (“Public Key Cryptography Standard”) in a mobile radio communication environment with possibly limited transfer rate and network security. US 2005/0010757 discloses a certification method on a distributed network wherein a certification request from a network node to a certification server is for security reasons only possible within a predefined time interval from the initialization of the corresponding network node, which in connection with mobile terminals would again require a basically impracticable individualization at a time close to their usual initialization within the framework of production. The receipt of a certificate request from a network node within the permissible time interval is monitored on the basis of the network node initialization time available to the certification server and of the time interval duration.